The light of civilisation.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods; Regnery, 2005, $54.95.

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, by Rodney Stark; Random, 2005, $49.95.

THESE TWO BOOKS, both available in Australia from Freedom Publishing, should be read by everyone. They are intellectually stimulating, exciting, invigorating, educational and enormously important. Written in highly readable style, they are also formidable stock for any Christian's intellectual ammunition-locker.

In his anti-Christian children's books written as a counter to C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" series, Philip Pullman portrays Christianity as the great enemy of reason, having one character say at a moment of dramatic revelation:

   There are two great powers ... and they've been
   fighting since time began. Every advance in human
   life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and
   decency we have has been torn by one side from
   the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human
   freedom has been fought over ferociously between
   those who want us to know more and be wiser and
   stronger, and those who want us to obey and be
   humble and submit.

Naturally Christianity wears the black hat here. The Catholic Church is especially singled out as fanatically determined to prevent human reason advancing, with characters like Father Gomez (a name redolent with associations with the Spanish Inquisition and perhaps of that potent focus of paranoia, Opus Dei), "pale and trembling with zealotry" ready to torture and murder children to achieve this end. It is a notion which certainly dates from the anti-Catholicism and anti-Christianity of Gibbon and certain aspects of the European Enlightenment but is older than that.

This mythology was sent up by G.K. Chesterton in at least two stories--the first of the Father Brown stories, "The Blue Cross", and The Man Who Was Thursday, in which imposters pretending to be priests or clergymen give themselves away by attacking reason, which, as Father Brown says, is bad theology. In The Man Who Was Thursday--first published in 1908--the imposter admits in memorable words:

   I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed
   up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our
   anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire
   and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from
   them that bishops are strange and terrible old men
   keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was
   misinformed. When on my first appearing in
   Episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a
   voice of thunder, "Down! Down! Presumptuous
   human reason!" they found out in some way that I
   was not a bishop at all.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown also portrays Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, as a major agent for perpetuating lies and superstition, and a haven for torturers, murderers and lunatics. The book depends on the premise that the Catholic Church has systematically lied about the central fact of Christian history since its inception: Christianity is a hoax, and the church an agent of darkness, battening vampire-like on the ignorance and superstition which it promulgated. By 2005 it was estimated that 28 million copies of The Da Vinci Code had been sold, suggesting about 100 million people had read it.

Here two distinguished American scholars, working separately and from somewhat different perspectives, take that myth and destroy it. Pullman's declamation and Brown's premise, as attacks on Christianity, are not only false, but the reverse of the truth. These books document in detail how the church, rather than being the enemy of reason and progress, has been their greatest and often their only friend. It is to the Christian church alone that we owe the birth and growth of scientific civilisation, and the fact that human life expectancy is now more than about thirty.

In the lead-up to the great billion-pound flop of the Millennium Dome, the minister in charge of the project, Peter Mandelson, claimed: "the impact of Christianity on Western civilisation will be central to the Millennium experience". I remarked at the time in my book Blair's Britain that to speak of the impact of Christianity on Western civilisation was like speaking of the impact of Shakespeare on Hamlet. No one who reads these books, both meticulously referenced, can be left in any doubt that it was the Catholic Church that laid the foundations of modern civilisation, and not just as one incidental influence upon it among many.

PROFESSOR WOODS emphasises that after the fall of Rome, it was the church alone that kept literacy alive in monastic schools. It was the church that educated more than 90 per cent of the people who learnt to read. Monks preserved the heritage and culture of antiquity by laboriously copying Greek and Roman manuscripts. Modern scholarship finds the term "The Dark Ages" a misnomer for those times, but it was the church that prevented them from being darker.

As well as literacy, the monasteries preserved and advanced agricultural science, drained fens and marshes and taught techniques of irrigation and animal breeding. They also spread the use of water-power and the associated technologies of machinery and metallurgy. One scholar, Gerry McDonnell of Bradford University, believes that at the time of the dissolution of the English monasteries they were on the verge of setting up blast-furnaces. The popes nurtured the first universities.

The church also pioneered modern astronomy, displacing the pseudo-deterministic and free-will-denying superstition of astrology. In this context the persecution of Galileo is often brought up against the church, but in fact that had more to it than met the eye, and had less to do with science than with politics.

Father George Coyne, the director of the Vatican Observatory, applied for astronaut training in the 1960s. His Provincial is said to have muttered, "If I let you become an astronaut, George, every priest will want to." A priest, Georges Lemaitre, first postulated the Big Bang theory, now generally accepted as the correct explanation of the origin of the universe. In the Who Who of Nobel Prize Winners 1900-1990 Catholics are listed as the largest Christian group of Nobel laureates (the only larger single religious group are Jews). No other institution than the church gave such support to astronomy in the centuries between the Middle Ages and the modern period. The same might be said for all other branches of science. Christianity was in any event not backward about getting into space. The first religious figure to set foot on another world was an Episcopalian lay preacher named Buzz Aldrin.

Among the great Catholic clerical astronomers might be mentioned Giuseppe Piazzi, who discovered the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801, and established the observatory at Palermo. Piazzi obtained the modern equipment and instruments for it, and converted Palermo from scientific nullity in poverty-stricken, ignorant and backward Sicily to a great centre for astronomy, later involved with the first imaging x-ray astrophysics. Despite being a Catholic priest and among other things a Professor of Dogmatic Theology in Rome, in 1788 Piazzi travelled to England to work with the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne (a Protestant minister) and the famous instrument-maker Ramsden.

It was from Catholic culture that the whole notion of progress arose: nothing like it happened anywhere else in the world, where science and technology either stopped at a very low level, or never got started at all. Unlike the Mystery religions, Christian philosophy promoted reason, and, unlike the Graeco-Roman philosophers who made great theoretical discoveries at Alexandria and elsewhere, the Christian monastic tradition did not despise but welcomed experiment, artisanship and the practical application of technology. The inheritance of Aristotle and the scholastic tradition was a mixed blessing for the universities, becoming in many ways a collection of stultifying dogmas, hostile to empiricism and experiment, and it was Christian thinkers who enabled learning to break free of this.

The contribution of the church to art is so obvious as to hardly need elaborating on, and the medieval cathedrals of Europe are eloquent testimony to its contribution to architecture. We have seen rather too much of the unappealing nature of post-Christian art to need the message rubbed in. Less well-known is the church's pioneering contribution to modern economics, the early scholastics being, according to Murray Rothbard, the ancestors of the Austrian School and of some of the ideas articulated in the eighteenth century by Adam Smith.

By championing the rights of American Indians at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the church laid the foundations of international law and doctrines of universal human rights. Various doctors of the church, of whom St Thomas Aquinas was probably the best known, established the conditions for a just war.

The church was also responsible for much of the procedures of modern domestic law, with evidence, for example, replacing trial by ordeal in deciding cases. It was the church that institutionalised charity and hospitals, which had not really existed in the world before on any systematic basis, and other works of public welfare, and orders of chivalry and knighthood as well as a professional diplomatic service. It also gave greater recognition to women's rights than had been the case anywhere in the world before. On all this Professor Woods sheds a bright light.

He argues that the Renaissance--hailed by the humanist and secularist historical tradition as the time humanity began to awake from Dark Age superstition-was actually a time of retrogression, when secularism flourished, and with it alchemy, astrology and witch-burning rose again to challenge the church's championship of science and reason (some may see modern parallels). In 1789, in the name of reason and progress, the atheistic or deistic French revolutionary government confiscated church property in France, including schools and hospitals. Ten years later the number of students enrolled at universities had dwindled from 50,000 to 12,000. Fifty years later the number of French hospitals was about half what it had been before the confiscation.

The French revolutionaries also of course beheaded Antoine Lavoisier, sometimes known as the "Father of Modern Chemistry", in 1794 with the alleged comment that "The Republic has no need of scientists." Political progressivism has often equalled scientific regression: in Pol Pot's liberated Kampuchea wearing spectacles meant death for being an intellectual.

The final chapters on Western morality and the so-called post-Christian world are particularly important, and by implication posit a warning of the relationship between decadent nihilistic art and thought and a new Dark Age.

PROFESSOR STARK'S book does not duplicate Woods' work but complements it (with somewhat more emphasis on economic history). He is also concerned with Protestantism as well as Catholicism and his book takes the matter beyond the Reformation. He argues that modern scientific civilisation arose once, and once only, because it was Christianity alone that saw religion and reason as allies. He does not agree with the German sociologist Max Weber that industrial and technological society--and capitalism--arose from a particularly Protestant ethic of individualism but argues rather that it arose from the whole of Christianity, the religion that supported astronomy against astrology, and whose spirit of enquiry turned alchemy into chemistry. "Real science," he says, "arose only once: in Europe ... Why? Again, the answer has to do with images of God."

He gives the Romans a little less credit than I would, but that is a minor detail. The so-called Dark Ages before the Renaissance, were, he argues persuasively, a time when, under the influence of Christianity, standards of living rose to a greater height than they had under the Roman empire.

The Roman roads, built for marching armies, were not used by successor people not because they were too backward and ignorant to appreciate them but because they were too narrow and often too steep for the more advanced wheeled traffic of the Dark Ages. There were multitudes of other inventions, in general directly nurtured by the church through monasteries and other religious institutions. Trade, which in the Roman empire had often simply meant Rome robbing the provinces, became more a matter of mutual benefit.

The Romans had known about water-wheels but had done little with them. After the fall of Rome waterwheels spread all over Europe, making the Dark Ages the first period in history when machine-power began to replace the sweat of slaves on a significant scale. Like Woods, though using some different sources, Stark points out how water-power progressively released men, women, children and animals from killing labour, making available cheaper food and clothing (their earliest uses included grinding corn and fulling cloth).

Where spectacles originated is uncertain, but it was in Venice and Florence in the late thirteenth century that they began to be mass-produced, not only enhancing the quality of life directly for the wearers but also massively increasing human productivity and therefore wealth, and leading to lenses and all the sciences which depend on them.

Geniuses in earlier civilisations and other civilisations had made great discoveries, but they had been one-offs and they had not been followed through. Stark argues:

   Centuries of meditation will produce no empirical
   knowledge. But to the extent that religion inspires
   efforts to comprehend God's handiwork, knowledge
   will be forthcoming, and because to comprehend
   something fully it is necessary to explain it, science
   arises as the "handmaiden" of theology.

The earliest fathers of the church believed in facts, and that God could become known not through secret mysteries of gnosticism but through intellect. When in other cultures scientific and technological civilisation either never got off the ground or halted and failed at a low level, Christianity was an intellectual engine of continuing progress--progress being a concept virtually non-existent anywhere else. Saint Augustine wrote: "Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known ... those things that have been written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed." In Florence in 1306 Fra Giordano proclaimed: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them. Every day one could discover a new art."

Professor Stark closes with a statement by a leading modern Chinese scholar, one of a group commissioned to examine Western success, made to a group of visiting professionals in Beijing and quoted in David Aikman's book Christ in Beijing." How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (2003). This scholar reported:

   One of the things we were asked to look into was
   what accounted for the success, in fact the preeminence,
   of the West all over the world. We
   studied everything we could from the historical,
   political, economic and cultural perspective. At
   first, we thought it was because you had more
   powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it
   was because you had the best political system.
   Next we focused on your economic system. But in
   the past twenty years we have realised that the
   heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
   That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian
   moral foundation of social and cultural life was
   what made possible the emergence of Capitalism
   and then the successful transition to democratic
   politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Lawrence Innaccone, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, has said of this book:

   Rodney Stark may be the most original religious
   researcher of the past hundred years. He has
   revolutionised contemporary thought about
   religion and economics and in this book he makes
   a compelling case for the claim that we owe our
   prosperity, freedom and progress to our faith in one
   great, loving and rational God. The Victory of
   Reason is itself a victory of reason in a field long
   dominated by anti-Western, anticapitalist and
   antireligious myth. Stark's extraordinary
   scholarship has made it possible to again ask, and
   perhaps finally answer, some of the most enduring
   questions about faith and spirituality.